The annual
Sundance Film Festival is underway in Park City, Utah, and the 2014 lineup
includes major Russian players in short, documentary and feature premieres.

“It’s the biggest thing
I’ve been a part of,” said Sandhya Daisy Sundaram, a graduate film
student from India whose documentary short, "Love. Love. Love."
debuts at Sundance on Jan. 18.

Sandhya Daisy Sundaram. Source: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

The film was the result of her
participation in 2013's Cinetrain, a Russian cinema project in which filmmakers
from around the world travel by train across Siberia for one month, completing
a film on a given topic.

Her prompt? Women.

“All I had known about Russia was
from books and movies. There seems to be a whole lot of talk about vanity in
Russian women, but for me, it seemed like such a small part of them,” said Sundaram.

Set against a frigid Russian winter,
“Love. Love. Love.” instead seeks warmth from its subjects, searching to unfold
how love is shaped in Russia through the singular voice of its women. From
ballerinas to babushkas, Sundaram invites women to share tales of sacrifice,
and moments of vulnerability and intimacy, to unveil the universality of love.

“The idea of the film is to not
categorize people,” said Sundaram. “I wanted a snapshot of women in Russia,
women who really work hard in their daily lives for family and love.”

Also premiering at Sundance is Anton
Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man ­ — the
first English-language major motion picture for
27-year-old Russian actor Grigory Dobrygin.

As Issa Karpov, a
Russian-Chechen immigrant to Hamburg who raises investigators' eyebrows as he
tries to retrieve a questionable inheritance from his late father, Dobrygin
shares the screen with Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright, Daniel Brühl, Phillip
Seymour Hoffman, and Willem Dafoe.

While Sundance will
prove a new adventure for Sundaram and Dobrygin, for documentary filmmaker
Maxim Pozdorovkin, it’s quickly becoming old hat.

In his feature
follow-up to the much-buzzed documentary Pussy
Riot: A Punk Prayer (co-directed by Mike Lerner), which earned a Special
Jury Prize at Sundance in 2013, Pozdorovkin debuts The Notorious Mr. Bout.

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“What’s so interesting about The
Notorious Mr. Bout is that it is very much about the film Viktor was making
of his own life,” said Pozdorovkin, who completed his dissertation at Harvard
on found footage, and dedicates about two-thirds of the feature to Bout’s home
videos.

“I love documentary film. Especially with these found footage
documentaries, you’re essentially reinventing the form of film in response to
the material that you have. I think it’s the golden age of documentary right
now. I think for many, many years, the best, most exciting films are
documentaries. That being said, my next film is a fiction film,” said Pozdorovkin, who next writes and directs
an interracial sex comedy aboutan Internet
marriage between a Russian woman and black man in New York City, currently under the working
title, Milk and Honey.

“I don’t look for
things that are controversial, but I am drawn to these interesting stories and
the way that they’ve been represented, and I’m interested in engaging with
that, but it’s not like I’m just like, oh, because it’s controversial, I want
do it,” said Pozdorovkin, whose film
Pussy Riot was formally banned in
Russia by an
official from the city’s culture ministry.

“I was captivated by Viktor Bout for many years before he was
indicted, and I had done a lot of research on the arms trade and had a lot of
opinions, and he seemed like a perfect vehicle for exploring that issue and
exploring a lot of misconceptions about the arms trade that people have.”

Similar to last
year’s Sundance premiere, during which recently released Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich spoke via Skype, Pozdorovkin once again finds
his subjects unable to attend.

“I’m in a trap. I
keep on doing films about people who are in prison, so it’s really hard to
premiere them. Unfortunately, Viktor [Bout] doesn’t have Skype capacity. We may
do a Skype interview with Alla, his wife, who is very prominent in the film. Not
at the premiere, but maybe at a future screening.”

As for newcomer Sundaram, Sundance is
less about the details, and more about the whole.

“It has been a very overwhelming and
humbling experience,” said Sundaram.

But for the film student working on
completing her thesis film back home, her journey into cinema has just rolled its
opening credits. “I return home to finish post-production on my thesis film,
and then, let’s see from there!”